The US Army has formed an “Army Web Risk Assessment Cell” to spy on the personal blogs and forum posts of soldiers and their families, according to a confidential military document released today by the transparency group Wikileaks.

The cell is to “Conduct routine checks of web sites on the World Wide Web for disclosure of critical and/or sensitive information that is deemed a potential OPSEC compromise.”

Web sites include, but are not limited to, “Family Readiness Group (FRG) pages, unofficial Army web sites, Soldier’s web logs (blogs), and personal published or unpublished works related to the Army.”

The passage comes from a March update to the US Army’s 2007 “Operations Security” regulation 530-1, which is the Army’s high-level document on how the service should keep secrets.

In an unusual circularity, the disclosure of the document on the internet today is something the document was designed to prevent.